Omega Place

by Graham Marks

  ‘And that’s what put Henry Garden on their radar, leaving the office?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Salter nodded.

  ‘Not much to go on, is it?’

  ‘Couple of times he was making phone calls almost the second he was outside the building.’

  ‘Really?’

  It was Salter’s turn to shrug. ‘Better than having nothing to go on at all, boss. It may be clutching at straws, but it might be worth looking into.’

  Mercer sketched a stick man holding a telescope. ‘Have you started looking into Garden?’

  Salter nodded. ‘The ball is rolling.’

  The other side of the pad, where the stick man with the telescope was looking, Mercer drew a big question mark.

  ‘Be interesting to see if it knocks anything over, won’t it?’

  23

  Friday 18th August, Swindon

  A patrol car had spotted the Renault van at around ten in the morning, in the car park of a motorway service area, and immediately called the details in. As the subjects might still be in the vicinity, the uniforms were told to make themselves scarce and find somewhere out of sight where they could keep a watch on the exits until back-up arrived.

  Two nearby plain-clothes units descended on the service area, very low-key, no sirens, no lights. As soon as they were able to confirm that the subjects weren’t still there, the waiting forensic team went in.

  It was obvious from the moment they began working that the Renault had been comprehensively wiped down. Not a useable print anywhere on any surface, which was the kind of thing you expected when up against serious pro criminals, not a bunch of delinquent vandals, like the Scene of Crime men thought they were dealing with. Even the ashtray had been emptied and cleaned out.

  So what should have been an easy gig turned into more of a marathon than expected, with everything coming out, including the floor mats and a pair of rather ancient, stained mattresses in the back. Under which they discovered the remains of a couple of marijuana cigarettes and a scrunched-up paper bag that had recently contained – from the aroma and grease stains – some kind of spicy pasty. Inside the bag, along with some crumbs, there was a till receipt, sodden with cooking oil and its dot matrix print almost illegible. Almost, but, with the tech available back in the lab, not quite.

  ‘Thanks for that…’ Mercer put down the phone and smiled at Salter.

  ‘Good news, boss?’

  ‘Good and bad… they abandoned the van, which had fake plates by the way, at a motorway service area near Swindon; it was wiped down so anything they might have touched was virtually factory clean. Which is the bad news.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘But they didn’t quite clean up as perfectly as they thought. Forensics found what they so precisely put as a ‘food receptacle’ – a discarded paper bag, with a till receipt in it. Dated yesterday. From a shop in the Kingsland Road. The owner of the van’s been traced through the vehicle’s ID number and he swears he’s never been anywhere near the place, let alone went there yesterday.’

  ‘You reckon their home base is near there, then?’

  ‘I wouldn’t bet the farm on it, Ray, but I think it’s worth putting feet on the street to find out. We’ve got four of their faces now, someone’s going to recognise one of them.’

  ‘We got the budget for that kind of activity?’

  ‘We’ll find out when I ask, but the impression I get is that the quicker this is cleared up, the happier everyone…’ Mercer looked upwards, indicating the floors above her, ‘… will be.’

  24

  Friday 18th August, Victoria, London

  Henry Garden could not believe his luck. He’d spent the last three days trying to work out how to get his hands on the pictures Nick Harvey wanted from him and had been foiled at every turn. Every time he’d rung in, always on the random numbers Nick had supplied him with and from different call boxes, all he’d had were excuses, which had not gone down well at all. And he’d been so busy with his day-to-day work he hadn’t even been able to run the surreptitious check he wanted to do on the Dean Mayhew character, Nick’s mysterious ‘persuader’.

  And then this morning, there it was on his desk, the report to the Home Secretary he’d been copied in on. The one about the latest Omega Place operation in Bristol, which included the number plate details of the van the people had been using. And the possible location of their home base. It wasn’t what Nick had asked for, but it was at least something and, on top of that, it was information that couldn’t definitely be tracked back to him. It should get him off the hook, at least for a bit, and he’d left the office as soon as he could, making some excuse about an emergency dentist’s appointment as he went out of the building.

  Garden turned off the main street and made for the phone booth just a few metres away. It was occupied. He stood outside, directly in the line of sight of the person, a middle-aged woman, using the phone, and rather theatrically checked his watch. The woman turned her back on him and carried on talking. For another five minutes. When she finally vacated the booth Garden had to wedge the door open with his foot because of the overpoweringly sickly smell of lily of the valley she’d left behind. He dialled the day’s designated number for Nick Harvey, which, unusually, he picked up after just five rings.

  ‘What is it, James? Good news, I very much hope.’

  ‘They hit Bristol last night. Disabled a dozen or more cameras and left their flyers and stickers all over the place –’

  ‘Interesting though that information is, Henry,’ Harvey interrupted, ‘it’s got absolutely nothing to do with the pictures I requested. Have you got them, James?’

  ‘They got caught on film again, four of them this time.’

  ‘How careless of them. What about my pictures?’

  ‘They were filmed in their van. I have the licence plate details, and the area where they’re probably living.’ Garden smiled to himself, picturing the surprise on Nick Harvey’s face.

  ‘Why didn’t you say so?’

  ‘I just did.’

  ‘Give the details to me.’

  Garden almost said ‘say please’, but thought better of it and simply read out the sequence of letters and numbers and told him about the Kingsland Road location. He was about to tell Nick that the van was a Renault Trafic when the line went dead.

  Coming out on to the pavement Garden started to cross the road, wrinkling his nose as he tried to work out which was worse, the air quality in the booth or outside it, just as a cyclist came down the street the wrong way. Leaping backwards he cursed the two-wheeled blight of bike couriers, checked the road again, then set off back to the office.

  Garden didn’t notice that the courier had stopped a little way down the street. Nor did he realise the man was watching him from behind his wraparound dark glasses as he spoke into the walkie-talkie attached to the strap of his shoulder bag.

  25

  Friday 18th August, Kingsland Road

  Paul saw a space coming up on his left and slowed the van down; there was no one behind him, but he indicated anyway, pulling up, selecting reverse and slowly feeding the Toyota into the gap between two cars. Rob had picked this van out from a motorway service area car park near Swindon, insisting they had to change vehicles; Paul couldn’t work out if all the swapping was strictly necessary, or if it was just that Rob liked nicking motors. Now its job was done they were abandoning it to its fate on some skanky north London street.

  Terri wound her window down and took a look. ‘Not bad… a crack shot with the catapult, and he can park. Your essay on “What I Learnt on my Holidays” is going to make interesting reading.’

  Paul shot her a glance as he straightened up. ‘Who says I’m going back anywhere that I’d be writing an essay?’ He cut the engine. ‘Eh?’

  ‘OK, so you’re not going back anywhere… I thought you probably would be.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I dunno…’ Terri reached down and picked up the plastic carrier bag from the flo
or by her feet. ‘Come on, let’s clean up this heap and get back, I’m bloody starving.’

  Paul took the rag Terri handed him, but didn’t do anything with it. ‘Why?’

  ‘Look, I didn’t mean anything, OK… I just got the impression you were coming down here for some laughs, not for ever.’ She took a spray cleaner out of the bag and pumped some on to her bit of cloth. ‘Don’t you miss anyone up there?’

  ‘Maybe. What about you?’ Paul took the spray off her. ‘You got nowhere to go back to?’

  Terri didn’t say anything, not looking at Paul, concentrating all her energies on rubbing the dashboard and glove compartment. ‘I feel as if I left home when I was, like, twelve,’ she said, still not looking at him. ‘Like it’s just been me since then.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  Terri stopped wiping the dashboard and turned her head, face shaded by the peak of her pale baseball cap. ‘Cos that’s when they shoved me off to boarding school.’

  ‘Boarding school? You don’t –’

  ‘I don’t what?’

  ‘You don’t, like, sound that way…’

  ‘What way?’

  ‘Y’know, posh.’

  ‘You repeat one word of this, Paul, and I will –’

  ‘They don’t know about it, the school and stuff?’

  ‘My little secret.’

  Paul ran the cloth over the steering wheel and then the gear stick and handbrake. ‘Reckon they’d take the piss about it?’

  Terri wiped the door handle and then opened the door. ‘What d’you think? I’d never hear the last of it from Rob.’

  ‘Why tell me, then?’ Paul cleaned the driver’s side-door handle and got out, locking the door before slamming it shut. He walked down to the back of the van where Terri was waiting.

  ‘Probably shouldn’t’ve done.’ Terri nodded at the rear doors. ‘Reckon the inside needs going over?’

  ‘Better had.’ Paul lifted the handle, pulled open the door and climbed up. ‘I won’t tell, trust me.’

  ‘Better bloody not.’

  Paul looked sideways at Terri as they gave the interior of the van a quick once-over. That was the trouble with girls. You could never tell, when they were nice to you, if it was because they ‘just wanted to be friends’ or because they ‘liked you, but not in that way’. He knew he liked Terri, very much in that way, but didn’t dare do or say anything that might let him find out exactly how she felt. He wanted to know, but he wanted hope, not disappointment.

  He remembered the words of some rock ballad his dad always sang, if he was a bit pissed – so it happened quite often – and he’d been talking about breaking up with his mum.

  ‘And then the question seemed to turn out wrong,’ it went, his dad belting the words out in his raspy cigarette voice. Which was just how he felt, that he’d say something stupid and Terri would walk away, like his mum had. History repeating itself.

  On the way back to the house Terri’s mobile went. She listened, nodding, then cut the call.

  ‘Got to go to the shops.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Can we get some stuff for a stir-fry, and the evening paper.’

  ‘Must mean Sky’s cooking.’

  ‘Just as long as it’s not Rob.’ Terri rolled her eyes and gagged. ‘Rob doesn’t think it’s proper food if it’s not deep-fried or doesn’t come out of a can.’

  ‘Or chocolate. I reckon he’d maybe eat a carrot if it was covered in chocolate.’

  ‘True.’ Terri laughed at the thought.

  ‘D’you think we’ll be in the papers again?’

  ‘Orlando’ll be pissed off if we aren’t. Don’t know why he’s changed his mind about how we do things, why he wants all this publicity suddenly. Doesn’t make sense.’

  Paul thought back to the conversation he’d overheard Orlando having on the phone, the night he’d arrived in London. It had sounded like he was having an argument with a boss or business partner, but Omega Place wasn’t a business and Orlando didn’t seem like the kind of person who went in for partners.

  He wondered if he should tell Terri what he’d heard. She might know more and be able to figure out what had been going on. On the other hand, she might think he was a total creep for eavesdropping like he had, and then grass him up to Orlando. It wasn’t worth the risk. Maybe that conversation had had nothing to do with anything, and probably the fact that he knew about it should stay his little secret.

  They were out in the back garden again, Paul and Rob and Tommy and some cans. The Three Muskebeers, Tommy had called them. Terri was back inside, helping Sky in the kitchen, and Izzy probably wasn’t doing anything like what Rob’s fevered imagination was continually dreaming up. Paul had thought about staying in the kitchen as well, but knew he’d end up with some shitty skivvy job if he did.

  Rob popped his can and took a drink. ‘You find us a new place yet, Tommy?’

  ‘Nope…’ Tommy opened his can. ‘I did sod all about it, me.’

  ‘Why, man? I thought the Big Boss Man had spoken, like, and we were on the move?’

  ‘He spent the entire bloody day writing, didn’t he? A new Manifesto, he said.’

  ‘What about Izzy, what was she doing?’

  ‘Helping him.’

  Rob leered. ‘I bet she was!’

  ‘She was. They were down here, man, all day. Getting dead serious about “the next message to the people”, he called it.’

  ‘Wonder why he changed his mind?’ Paul chose the least rickety chair and sat down.

  ‘He kind of got fired up, this morning, after he got a phone call.’ Tommy picked up a piece of rubble and lobbed it down the garden. ‘He didn’t answer it or anything, just swore at the phone and turned it off. Told me to lose that number and to fix him up a new one. So I spent most of today mucking round with mobiles.’

  Paul took a drink from his can. Another phone call. From the same person he’d heard Orlando talking to before? Yeah, right, why think that? Probably his mum. He grinned to himself, wondering what a radical activist’s mum would be like, imagining this female version of Orlando telling him right-on, socialist, propaganda bedtime stories…

  26

  Friday 18th August, Hendon

  Dean Mayhew put the phone down. Thank Christ for that. Something to do, at last. He’d been hanging round, twiddling his sodding thumbs, for days, waiting for Nick Harvey to call. He was on wages, good wages, but even so, he hated doing nothing and there were only so many times you could dismantle, clean and put back together various parts of your motorbike. Or your guns. And Dean had quite a lot of guns, for someone who lived in a very average suburban house in north London and whose neighbours thought he was something to do with insurance, which in a way he was. He ensured that the things his clients wanted to happen did happen. And vice versa.

  He’d worked, on and off, for Harvey’s company, AquiLAN, for quite a few years now. They were good clients. But this was the first time that the boss man had ever been so personally involved in a job, although, he thought as he made himself a cup of filter coffee, there’s always a first time for everything. Dean boiled the kettle and poured the water on to the single-cup cafetière, already making a mental ‘To Do’ list. He’d be leaving the house within the next twenty minutes.

  Harvey hadn’t given him much to go on. The only real piece of information he’d got was that the people he was after were thought to be holed up in some squat in the Kingsland Road area. No more and no less than the police had, so Harvey said. Nothing, really. Apart from the fact that he could tell these Omega Place people were a cautious bunch. He liked their style. Seemed professional, not a bunch of chancers, even though they’d screwed up in Bristol and got properly caught on camera in their van. Still, if people didn’t make mistakes his job would be so much harder.

  His job was to find the Omega Place operation, then close it down. No negotiation. Things had already progressed well beyond that, which was why he’d been called in. He preferred the no bu
llshit, in-and-out jobs. Black and white work, he thought of it as. No grey areas.

  Upstairs he packed his tank bag and a small backpack, chose a fake ID pack from the selection he had available, locked everything either incriminating or valuable up in the floor safe hidden under his bed and went back downstairs. There was nothing in the house that needed looking after while he was away – no plants, no pets and certainly no partner – and once he’d activated the alarm the place was pretty secure. The system he’d had installed was hard-wired to a central control, which sent the law round if it was activated, which, considering what he did, he thought was quite ironic.

  It hadn’t taken him long to get over to the Kingsland Road area on the Yamaha. The first thing he did was check all the local newsagents for people offering rooms to rent; he was moving in until the job was done, which could mean a couple of days, maybe even a working week, if he was unlucky. Not that Dean believed in luck, way too risky. Instead he relied on an almost obsessive attention to detail and a ruthless efficiency, a combination that had worked well for him so far in his career.

  It took him an hour or so, but he finally got what he wanted: a room – first floor, front – in a house with off-street parking for the bike at the side of the house. He rented the place for a month, paid in cash and told the landlord he was a contract computer programmer from out of town, working shifts for an office in the City. He intimated he could be a regular customer.

  The bedsit was tacky, basic, but reasonably clean – though it hardly mattered as Dean didn’t intend to spend very much time there. As soon as he’d stowed everything he didn’t need to carry with him well out of sight, he went out to a nearby hardware shop. Half an hour later he’d replaced the Yale lock on his door, just in case the landlord felt like poking around. Then he went out to start tracking down his prey.